Food Court Wars – Casting Guide

This is a single episode reality show hosted by Tyler Florence that is a simpler version of Food Truck Faceoff. The show appeared on the Food Network
with the reruns still airing. The basic premise of the show is that two team consisting of two contestants each launch a restaurant in a food court. The competition takes place over three days in which each team creates a menu, markets the launch and finally opens the doors. The team that generates the most revenue from sales wins a fully paid one year lease for their restaurant in the food court which the show claims if valued at $100,000.

The show was modestly popular in its 2013 and 2014 seasons averaging about 1 million views. The final and 20th episode of the show aired on May 29, 2014, and there has been no additional information about future casting.

Food Court Wars Cancellation

There have been some reports that the show was cancelled after its 2014 season. The show completed the 13 episode production run and received respectable number of viewers. We haven’t received official word that the show is cancelled so it’s possible the production schedule was delayed to make this a summer series rather one that is more competitive in the January time frame. Additionally, the show continues to have an active website on Food Network’s page.

Food Court Wars Show Overview & Strategy

The overall competition is based solely on generating the most revenue from operating the restaurant on the final day of the competition. The show offers a prize worth roughly $100,000 from the lease plus the advertising they received from being on the show which is roughly another $30,000+ depending on the market. Overall, this is incredibly high prize value for beating out one other team. For comparison, the winner of Chopped or Cupcake Wars much each defeat 3 other bakers to simply win a $10,000 prize. Food Court Wars prize is more than 10x those payouts. From a production standpoint, the show gets a huge benefit in that the mall gets a bump in traffic from the food court wars creating a very robust symbiotic relationship.

Due to the rules around the show, there are some special strategies that we’d recommend. These are certainly not the optimal methods for running a long-term business, but in the short-term to simply generate total income these will provide and advantage over a team who chooses just to play it straight.

1. Create Simple & Fast Food – The winner of the show will need to sell more than 700 servings. The quality of the food is less important than being able to serve everyone. If a team is too slow, they risk losing a lot of their customers.
2. Bring Friends & Family – As the contestants compete in their home town, there’s a real opportunity to pack the line with followers of your existing business.
3. Sell Multiple Items Per Customer – While it may be difficult to get more than 100 people to visit your shop during the few hour window that it’s open, it is completely within the rules to sell multiple items per customer. This means if you have the people you bring in all order three or four of the exact same dish, you can more than triple the earnings which gaining time making three dishes at once.
4. Don’t Offer Food Options – This is really a numbers game. You will be far better off creating an item like Fried Chicken or Donuts rather than something that needs to be personalized for each guest.
5. Use Social Media – Ensure that you announce to all your twitter, instagram and facebook followers that you will be setting up a shop. They can really pack the lines to ensure there is no downtime.
6. Have a Closing Strategy – The show appears to allows everyone who has placed an order when the time is closed to be served. When you are getting ready for time to be called, you should take these steps. Have all three members of the team begin taking orders and collecting money. The time may run out with a deficit of 100 orders, but they will still count even if the food is delivered later. Also, have a closer who clears out the inventory. Essentially have a close friend of family member place a $300 order for 60 assorted items right before time is called.

Reality Show Casting Process

The show is produced by Gordon Ramsay’s One Potato Two Potato company. Each competitor is required to complete this 15 page application form The form will take most people between 2-3 hours to complete so this is best something done over the course of an afternoon. Additionally, we recommend saving a copy of the file on your own computer so you can easily pull the answers back if there’s a mistake while filling out the whole form. The show has these requirements of the contestants:
ies to all applicants:

• Must be at least 18 years if age at the time of the application submission.
• Must be a legal U.S. citizen or permanent legal U.S. resident.
• Must be in excellent physical and mental health.
• Must be able to exclusively work on the Program for at least 5 days, plus any necessary travel days, with no
  other commitments.
• Must be within one-hour’s driving distance to the designated prize location. However, if willing to relocate to
  accommodate the prize location, must be able to provide a relocation plan.
• The Team must be able to provide a short business plan.
• The Team, as a whole, must possess the managerial skills and the culinary skills to run a restaurant.
• At no time during the casting process are applicants allowed to contact any mall in the designated city. All
  inquiries must mandatorily go through the casting company without exception.

Finally, if you applied to be on this show, we’d love to hear your story whether or not you were selected to appear on air. Feel free to click the link below to share your story with us and our readers. Also, anyone who won this show is especially suggested to contact us as we would happily do a feature article on your story with an update for all our readers.